2007-11-15

Check out those Falsies!

Check out those Falsies!

Help choose the winners of this year's Falsies Awards

Welcome to the fourth annual "Falsies Awards" contest, sponsored by the Center for Media and Democracy to recognize the people and players responsible for polluting our information environment. This year, we are asking you to help identify the worst spinners and propagandists of 2007. Please read through the list of nominees below and rank them. You can also nominate additional candidates in our readers' award section.

Please note: you can vote for multiple winners in each category and the CMD judges will take the recommendations into account when deciding the falsest of the false.

Please fill out the survey before 5:00 p.m. Central Standard Time on Friday November 30, 2007 to make sure your votes are tallied.

Thanks for your input, and stay tuned to www.prwatch.org in December for the announcement of this year's "Falsies Awards" finalists!

This Year's Nominees:

Glowing Green: The Nuclear Energy Institute -- with help from its PR firm, Hill & Knowlton -- launched the "Clean and Safe Energy Coalition" in April 2006 to promote the idea that building new nuclear reactors would help solve global warming. To head the coalition, it hired two people with seeming credentials as environmentalists: Christine Todd Whitman and Patrick Moore. Moore barnstormed the United States calling for the construction of "100 or 200" new nuclear power plants and insisting that storing high-level nuclear waste on the banks of the Connecticut River is "perfectly safe and secure." Whitman penned editorials declaring that nuclear power "stands out as the way to seriously address our energy needs." As the Columbia Journalism Review observed, many journalists treated Moore and Whitman "as dedicated environmentalists who have turned into pro-nuke cheerleaders ... the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Herald, the Baltimore Sun, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the Rocky Mountain News, the New York Times, and CBS News all referred to Moore as either a Greenpeace founder or an environmentalist, without mentioning that he is also a paid spokesman for the nuclear industry." Reporters also generally failed to note that Moore left Greenpeace in 1986 and has been working since then as a flack for the logging, mining, biotech, nuclear and other industries. Whitman, who served as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under the Bush administration, also got a free ride. Two thirds of the news stories that mentioned her support for nuclear power ignored the fact that she was on the nuclear payroll.

War More Years: The U.S. Democratic Party won control of both houses of Congress in the 2006 elections on a platform calling for change, with the war in Iraq the top issue on voters' minds. Once in power, however, other concerns rose to the surface, including the fear of being labeled "soft on national security." Rather than end the war, Democratic politicians, under the leadership of House speaker Nancy Pelosi, crafted "compromise" legislation to provide an additional $93 billion in funding for the war, combined with a few tepidly-worded, optional "benchmarks" of progress in Iraq that Bush was supposed to certify were being met in order to keep the money flowing. The liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org threw its weight behind the Pelosi bill, arguing that it would force "the Republicans to choose between an increasingly isolated president and the majority of the Congress and the majority of the American people." After Bush vetoed the Pelosi bill, the Democrats caved completely in May 2007 and gave Bush virtually everything he wanted in funding and unrestricted license to continue waging the war. In November, Pelosi was hard at work crafting a similar compromise -- yet another $50 million for the war, combined with a nonbinding "goal" that troops should be withdrawn by December 2008 -- a target date which accomplishes nothing other than ensure that Democrats can run as the anti-war party during next year's November elections.

Tricky Wiki: Computer programmer Virgil Griffith has created an online website called WikiScanner, which documents the organizational affiliations of numerous people who have anonymously edited Wikipedia. It found tens of millions of anonymous edits performed by more than 180,000 organizations, some of them in clear violation of Wikipedia policy. Perpetrators include the FBI, CIA, Britain's Labour Party, the Vatican, Wal-Mart, the Republican and Democratic parties, the Church of Scientology, Dell Computers, Microsoft, Apple, the United Nations, and Diebold, the maker of electronic voting machines. Wikiscanner also helped us catch several sneaky edits by various leading PR firms. At Weber Shandwick, for example, someone anonymously promoted its work on elections in Scotland; Ketchum sanitized a mention of its PR work for the government of Bangladesh; Hill & Knowlton whitewashed the human rights abuses of its client, the government of the Maldives; and Freud Communications edited articles on its clients including Pizza Hut and Carphone Warehouse.

Impeding Breast Feeding: The infant formula industry and its trade association, the International Formula Council (IFC), continue to pursue marketing strategies designed to undermine breastfeeding, even though babies that are not breast fed suffer higher rates of health problems including sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), diabetes, lymphoma, leukemia, Hodgkin's disease, obesity, high cholesterol and asthma. Peggy O'Mara, the editor of Mothering Magazine, has noticed several IFC-affiliated "stealth" websites "that appear to be grassroots advocacy sites, but are actually mouthpieces for the formula industry." The websites, MomsFeedingFreedom.com and Babyfeedingchoice.org, are campaigning against proposed restrictions on the free bags of infant formula being given to new parents by hospitals. BanTheBags, which supports a ban on free samples, observes that the sites "use classic formula company strategies, paying lip service to benefits of breastfeeding even as they promote formula. When breastfeeding is mentioned, it�s a chore and a bother." The formula industry was especially vocal about frank ads being developed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to warn about the consequences of not breastfeeding. According to the Washington Post, HHS bowed to industry pressure and toned down the ads so significantly that after they aired, the rate of breastfeeding in the U.S. actually dropped measurably.

The Vaccine for Cancer: The Merck pharmaceutical company, currently reeling from billions of dollars in legal settlements over Vioxx, its prescription pain reliever that has been linked to an increase in heart attack risk, has a new miracle drug it's selling -- Gardasil, a vaccine for Human Papillomavirus (HPV). Gardasil can prevent 4 strains of HPV, which is a leading cause of cervical cancer and pre-cancerous cervical conditions. Using the PR giant Edelman, Merck funded non-profit organizations including the Cancer Research and Prevention Foundation and Step up Women's Network to create a sense of fear and urgency in women and parents of girls. While cervical cancer does cause the deaths of more than 3,500 women each year in the U.S., it is not one of the leading causes of female mortality, and can be reliably detected and treated if regular Pap smears are performed. Merck has also lobbied heavily to make the vaccine mandatory for schoolgirls girls as young as 11 or 12 -- even though vaccination costs nearly $400 per person, and the drug has not been tested with that age group in mind. Merck's urgency to sell as much Gardasil as fast as possible is linked to its temporary monopoly on the market, but at least one competing drug will be presented for FDA approval within months.

The Best Falsies TV Has to Offer: In 2006, CMD published two ground-breaking reports on the widespread use of undisclosed fake TV news. Despite our airing its dirty laundry, and the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC's) levying of first-ever fines for the practice, TV newsrooms still use video news releases (VNRs) produced by PR pros for corporate clients as if they were real journalism. In fact, over the course of just six weeks, CMD documented that WGTU-TV 29 (Traverse City, Mich.) aired at least three VNRs, two with no disclosure and one with a fleeting acknowledgment of the source. The "news" anchor when each VNR was broadcast was Lori Puckett, who is actually WGTU's production and promotions manager. She introduced each VNR as if the on-air publicists were actual reporters. According to its website, "since ABC 29 & 8 first went on the air in 1971, our goal has been to take advantage of the best that television has to offer. Our staff is dedicated to providing the greatest viewing experience to our audience..." The station, which has no news director, made no public comment after the CMD report was released.

Smoke Your Moneymaker: While other medical schools have divested their tobacco stocks, Virginia Commonwealth University and its president, Dr. Eugene Trani, have been working to make VCU more tobacco-friendly. VCU includes a major regional medical center, a medical school, and schools of public health, pharmacy and nursing. Trani's tobacco-friendly actions have included negotiating a new smoking policy that explicitly permitted smoking in 41 out of 42 of the University's facilities; inviting Philip Morris CEO Michael Szymanczyk to be the keynote speaker at VCU's graduation ceremony in 2003; and accepting numerous grants totaling millions of dollars from cigarette maker Philip Morris. Dr. Trani also serves as a director of the Universal Corporation, a holding company that owns Universal Leaf Tobacco, the country's largest purchaser and supplier of tobacco leaf. According to an August 9, 2007 filing with the Securities Exchange Commission, he owns 6,250 shares of stock in Universal and thereby privately profits from domestic and foreign cigarette sales, while publicly appearing concerned about health care.

Mercenaries for Mercury: The National Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition, a "nonprofit organization" funded by the seafood industry, issued a report urging pregnant women and nursing mothers to eat more fish than recommended by health agencies concerned that mercury contamination in fish can hurt babies. The report claimed that women who avoid seafood to limit exposure to mercury deprive their babies and themselves of essential nutrients. The report was funded with $74,000 from the National Fisheries Institute, a client of the Burson-Marsteller PR firm. Another food industry front group, the Center for Consumer Freedom, chimed in with a news release calling for environmental groups to apologize for creating "panic" about mercury in foods. Respected health organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, responded to the report by re-emphasizing their advice to avoid excessive fish consumption.

Support Our Dupes: On its surface, America Supports You (ASY) was a program organized by the Pentagon through which Americans could send gifts and messages of support to U.S. soldiers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan. In May 2007, however, complaints forced the Pentagon to investigate charges of improper fundraising and unauthorized spending. Through a multi-million-dollar contract to the PR firm of Susan Davis International, ASY organized activities such as recruiting Americans back home to "text-message" their support to the troops on their cell phones, even though those messages aren't actually sent to the troops. ASY also organized Operation Straight Up, a Christian evangelical entertainment troupe that actively proselytizes among active-duty members of the US military. According to a report by Max Blumenthal, Operation Straight Up's activities include sending soldiers Christian evangelical tracts for use in "proselytizing efforts among Iraqi civilians," along with copies of "the controversial apocalyptic video game, 'Left Behind: Eternal Forces,'" in which players vie to "kill or convert all the non-believers left behind after the rapture." Meanwhile, soldiers injured in Iraq have been "supported" with substandard medical care at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and family members of killed soldiers have testified before Congress that the circumstances of their deaths remain mired in secrecy in cases where those deaths conflict with official Pentagon propaganda.

Add your own nominee. Who or what did we miss in the list above? Please use this section to nominate the person, company, think tank, PR firm, or organization that you feel deserves a Falsies Award as the most shameless shill and twister of truth for 2007.